Sunday, April 19, 2015

A weekend of overclocking.

I didn't manage to get any full article finished for today so I'll just go over some things I've done overclocking wise.

Firstly HWbot.org has launched GPUPI. It basically SuperPi for the GPU. You can either do 1B or 32B to earn points. Currently the best card for the benchmark is the R9 290X. I did my own little session on 1B and 32B.
Here are my results:

The orange background makes no difference. However it runs best with the non transparent windows 7 theme and having as few windows open as possible does help. This is a 99.9% GPU centric benchmark so even those of you with slow CPUs can get competitive scores given that you're running a high end GPU(AMD is better). Just like SuperPi, GPUPI will complain if your OC is not stable and you get results that aren't correct invalidating your run. 1B finishes in about 20-24 seconds on an R9 290X so if your running air cooling it is entirely possible to start the benchmark at 35C and finish before the GPU starts experiencing heat related instability(for me that is about 70C at 1203/1634 +200mv). 32B on the other hand is a beast that takes 20 to 24 minutes on an R9 290X. Heat is a real problem and my GPU ended up running at 82C throughout the test so you can't use temperature buffering to run higher core clocks. However GPUPI does like VRAM clock more than the core clock so you can get a good scores by maxing the VRAM and running a slower core than for 1B.
Obviously this was my first session so I didn't test everything. I will take suggestions on what software tweaks I should try in the comments.

Other than that I also got started prepping my GTX 590 for the E-power that should arrive this week. So here are photos of the card after I gave it a bath to get rid of the mess that soldering AWG 12 wires with a 150W iron leaves:

Hey if you like reading this blog you should go check out my sponsor Silicon Lottery. They sell pre binned i7s so you don't have to worry about a chip that clocks badly.